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CRITICS' PICKS New York CURRENT PAST links New York Pat Steir Pat Steir CHEIM & READ Paul Ramirez Jonas 547 West 25th Street “Project Europa: Imagining February 17–March 26 the (Im)Possible” Nature resounds throughout Pat Steir’s four-plus decades of Hiraki Sawa painting, whether in likeness (a pour of paint imaging a Judith Linhares waterfall) or as principle (the pour’s own willful, wayward Josh Smith paths, lured by gravity). It is amply visible, too, in this Andy Warhol searching suite of recent “Winter Paintings”—abstractions of Geoffrey Farmer about eleven by eleven feet halved into two tall panels of Feng Mengbo color. Their diaphanous sheen, which appears to veil vistas or sheath rock faces, marks a shift away from Steir’s Mark Bradford signature patinas (bleaching cascades, stardusty splatter) Los Angeles and toward late Rothko’s wintry horizons. Vertical vitality James Benning makes the crucial difference here, along with the depths of The Date Farmers Steir’s elemental, mineral palette—evoking by turns rust and raw silk, ash glaze and lava flow, and nary a drop in San Francisco mercury. Trevor Paglen The thin shock of verdigris streaking down the center seam Atlanta of Winter Group 6: Light Green, Payne’s Grey and Red, 2009–11, flashes a glint of light, or perhaps grows Dana Schutz lichenlike, where dusky slate blue meets a blue-brown Pat Steir, Valentine, 2009–11, oil on canvas, Austin wash. One half of Winter Group 3: Red, Green, Blue and 10' 7" x 9' 1 1/4". Amanda Ross-Ho Gold, 2009–11, resembles shadowy gold-leafed snow, while the other burns with the dark heat of peat or flint. Such color tangencies seem to inquire into the Charlotte energy transfer, adhesive hinge, or potential melting points between evenly forceful precincts brought Janet Biggs close. In the smaller, all-red Valentine, 2009–11, too, questions of relation palpitate. If its reddest inner flush attests to passionate ignition, an encroaching left edge of sizzling carnelian and scratchy orange Dallas splashes opposite bare the wear and weatherings of a heart. Michel Verjux Some months ago, Steir’s Ariadnian The Nearly Endless Line, 2010, had trussed up the insides of Sue Minneapolis Scott Gallery via one continuous, occasionally knotting brushstroke along its walls. Stand near her “The Spectacular of canvases here to trace eerier, wirier lines amid the drips, like long cracks in thawing ice. Hinting at Vernacular” seismic activity, they discreetly electrify these paintings’ megalithic presence.

Tampa — Chinnie Ding Trenton Doyle Hancock PERMALINK TALKBACK (0 COMMENTS) E-MAIL PRINT Washington, DC Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres Toronto Paul Ramirez Jonas Geoffrey Pugen ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES Mexico City 508 West 26 Street #215 February 23–April 2 Claire Fontaine New York isn’t nearly so crowded with commemorative London statuary as many older, European cities, but the grammar of Victoria Morton the sculptural tribute is familiar and resonant here Varda Caivano nonetheless. In The Commons, 2011, the centerpiece of his “Night Work” current show, Paul Ramirez Jonas has taken a landmark Ai Weiwei statue from the Campidoglio in Rome as his model. Ridding the original’s military horse of its imperial rider, Marcus Dublin Aurelius, the artist has remade the antique bronze in cork. Richard Tuttle This isn’t the first time that the California-born, Honduras- raised Jonas has employed the distinctive material; for Cambridge 2009’s Mercosul Biennial in Brazil, he used it to render a Lucia Nogueira series of alternative plaques for public monuments, effectively transforming the authoritative labels into a Berlin collection of open-access notice boards—all were fully Bob Mizer stocked with pushpins. Mark Soo The Commons plows a similar furrow; the life-size “When the Neighbor “When the Neighbor Came to Make a Phone sculpture’s base is dotted with paper ephemera that appear Call” to have been posted there by visitors. Everything—from press releases to cookie fortunes, offhand doodles to Porto gnomic pronouncements—fights for position. (I left behind a Paul Ramirez Jonas, The Commons, 2011, “To the Arts, Citizens!” business card and took away a handwritten recipe for cork and push pins, 10' 5" x 10' 4" x 5' 4". spinach lasagna.) It’s the kind of neat interplay between the Madrid personal and the municipal—with a nod to the literary if we Carlos Garaicoa think of Proust’s cork-lined study—that might function well as a Fourth Plinth project for London’s Trafalgar Square. In a gallery it feels a bit cooped up but remains a strikingly surreal image. The Beijing solitary companion work, a drawing of a seating plan collaged with entrance tickets, hints more quietly “Untitled” at thought around popular engagement. Taipei — Michael Wilson Jennifer Wen Ma

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“Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible” MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH ART GALLERY Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, Schermerhom Hall, 8th Floor January 19–March 26 This group exhibition, organized in conjunction with the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art, takes up the democratic idealism and lived contradiction of the European Union some twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event in 1989 marked a physical and symbolic turning point, heralding the reunification of the continent, this time under the aegis of an imagined community dedicated to human rights and multiculturalism. It is in the examination of NEWS DIARY FILM these fault lines that “Project Europa” shines. Newest Entries As much as it is now convention to refer to Europe as a Melissa Anderson on concrete entity, the themes of boundaries and barriers, be Truffaut’s The Soft Skin they topographic or social, are foregrounded here as objects Amy Taubin on the films of investigation. Francis Alÿs’s video The Nightwatch, 2004, of Manuel De Landa documents the release of a fox—traditional symbol of the Michael Joshua Rowin on leisured chasse au renard—after hours at the National Certified Copy Portrait Gallery in London, following its clandestine Travis Jeppesen on We movement between genres and historical periods, in effect Were Here highlighting the rigidity of class and social capital in the UK. Tony Pipolo on Bresson’s Bruno Serralongue and Yto Barrada—working in Calais, Eva Lietolf, Althaldensleben (“Ollin”), 2006, Diary of a Country Priest France, and Ceuta, Spain, respectively—use photographic color photograph, 32 x 27”. From the series Nicolas Rapold on Putty documentation to articulate the persistent travails of border “German Images—Looking for Evidence,” 2006. Hill crossing and migration into Europe’s open societies. While those projects are more geopolitically literal, there is also an undercurrent of contained violence evoked consistently in the exhibition. Danish group Superflex’s projection Burning Car, 2008, is perhaps the most overt instance, but Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s pictures from 2003 of strip malls in central France suggest the more subtle violence wrought by the homogenizing effects of globalization. More harrowing still, Eva Lietolf’s photo and text series “German Images—Looking for Evidence,” 2006, depicts tranquil German towns that were the sites of brutal hate crimes. Lietolf’s pictures are a perfect microcosm of “Project Europa,” which manages to concisely look beneath the banal, technocratic veneer of neoliberal Europe, exposing its hidden tragedies and the work that remains to be done. — Ian Bourland

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Hiraki Sawa JAMES COHAN GALLERY 533 West 26th Street February 17–March 26 Hiraki Sawa’s second solo show at this gallery is a multimedia meditation on temporality and texture. Sawa introduces these motifs in “Wax,” 2010–11, a series of twenty-four drawings in the gallery’s front room. These delicate pencil renderings of intricately mottled orbs, precise sections of which have been copiously erased, represent the waning and waxing phases of the lunar cycle. A composite portrait of time and a study of form and texture, this series sets the tone for the exhibition’s title piece: a complex and dreamy video-sound installation in the next room. Hiraki Sawa, O, 2009, multichannel video and O, 2009, is an immersive sensorial experience centered sound installation, dimensions variable. sound installation, dimensions variable. around three large freestanding video screens. The triptych’s flanking panels evoke the past by demonstrating physical evidence of time in natural and domestic settings. On the left, Sawa focuses his camera on desert geology—deep crevasses and ancient rock formations. The right panel features a dilapidated house where peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster, and remnants of a past life are haunted by the artist’s signature digitized silhouettes of birds, trees, and Ferris wheels. The central screen, in marked contrast, follows a flock of birds midflight in a majestic vision of life, motion, and the yet unknown. O’s sound track (a collaboration with musical ensemble Organ Octet) comprises soothing organ music punctuated by errant clatters and clangs. The noises relate to—and seem to emanate from—ten wall- mounted monitors showing video loops of solitary objects (lightbulb, mug, pitcher, and the like) gyrating like wobbly tops that never fall. In fact, the audio plays through five spinning mini-speakers strategically placed throughout the room. The echoing and undulating audio overlays are the perfect complement to Sawa’s visualization of time—wherein chronology is irrelevant, and past, present, and future coexist. — Mara Hoberman

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Judith Linhares EDWARD THORP GALLERY 210 Eleventh Avenue, Sixth Floor February 25–April 2 In Judith Linhares’s painting Picnic Rock, 2008, two naked woman loll on a blanket en plein air, enjoying a feast of chicken and layer cake. Nearby is a simple log cabin, and in the background a snow-capped mountain. It’s an idyllic scene, but watching the pair from a tree is a third female nude, her skin tinted purple by shadow. Is she a benign or malevolent figure? What is her relationship to the diners? Are they even aware of being observed? The artist leaves the answers up to us. The ambiguity of Picnic Rock is typical of Linhares, whose application, while bold and bright, nonetheless allows for an engaging narrative tension and whose compositions, though outwardly simple, allow for a deceptive breadth of affect. Judith Linhares, Hunger, 2010, oil on linen, 22 Linhares is a veteran of 1978’s storied “Bad Painting” x 26”. exhibition at the New Museum, but her broad, faux-naïf brushstrokes and juxtaposition of richly hued luxe, calme et volupté with a purposeful sense of awkwardness and unease align her with several younger artists, from Dana Schutz to George Condo. The large figure paintings in the current show, “Riptide,” are punctuated by several studies of animals, and even the most cartoonish of these—the drooling wolf in Hunger, for example, or the red-eyed subject of Arctic Hare (both 2010)—are more than a little grotesque. Attracting us with a sensual concentration on sex, food, and the great outdoors, and lulling us into a false sense of security via their lush, likable style, these are pictures with surprising bite. — Michael Wilson

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Josh Smith LUHRING AUGUSTINE 531 West 24th Street February 11–March 19 In his third solo exhibition at this gallery, the indefatigable Josh Smith employs a form of morbid humor through a study of memento mori that treads the line between irony and sincerity. A macabre sensibility lurks in his recent paintings, which might elicit a shudder or a smirk. Scrawled depictions of skeletons, insects, and decaying leaves are a few of the subjects here, all made manifest in an elaborate production that involves an infinite amount of permutations. One room presents several collaged panels made with scans of Smith’s previous paintings, their colors warped and modulated, along with layers of silk-screened images and View of “Josh Smith,” 2011. newsprint. These works are hung in an orderly grid, and their imagery emerges from their built-up surfaces, only to disappear into abstraction. As if to foreshadow Smith’s signature repetitiveness, a few homemade aluminum stop sign paintings appear as a glib note to self in this room, and yet they are unyielding in their provocation. The tongue-wagging panels meet the vaudevillian in Smith’s “Stage Paintings,” 2011, where rough- hewn platforms showcase a draped piece of canvas on which the artist’s name is rendered, akin to his earlier works. Illuminated by clamp-on lights, these stages, supports for the drop cloth paintings, literally collapse and fold up onto themselves, ready to be rolled away for the next show. They are installed as a cluster in the back gallery, and their self-containment—practical in their portability—evinces the forethought of construction. Throughout, Smith generates an experience in this show where painting, in its extension into different forms—as backdrop, as sign, or as memorial—performs in a greater capacity, perhaps for a wider audience. — Piper Marshall

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Andy Warhol ARMAND BARTOS FINE ART 25 East 73rd Street February 16–March 18 Andy Warhol’s entire oeuvre could arguably be reduced to a single iconic image: the soup can. It is surprising, then, to learn that since the artist’s legendary 1962 exhibition of thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Can paintings at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, no museum or gallery has focused exclusively on the subject. While a 1970–71 traveling retrospective devoted a section to the cans, only this exhibition—a small, tight collection at Armand Bartos titled “Warhol Soup” and encompassing prints, paintings, multiples, and ephemera—demonstrates how the Pope of Pop developed a singular idea into an artistic assembly line over three decades. Campbell’s Soup I, 1968, a suite of ten screenprints on white, easel-size sheets, hang side by side on the gallery’s longest wall. They are crisp, flawless, and nearly identical, with only the indication of an individual can’s contents (Green Pea, Pepper Pot) distinguishing one print from the Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can (Chicken next. Because their straightforward red, black, and gold with Rice), 1966, solid aluminum and silk- colors contrast with the jarring combinations of tangerine, screen inks, 4 x 2 5/8 x 2 5/8”. fuchsia, and mustard from Warhol’s other mid-1960s works, the Campbell’s Soup I prints perhaps represent a “return to reason” for the artist in the year the Factory took a businesslike turn after leaving its original midtown location—and also after Warhol was shot and nearly killed. The charm of Campbell’s Tomato Soup (Red), 1985, lies in the slightly tilted, black-outlined can on a small canvas with streaked paint mimicking the runniness of soup. Two product labels for Chicken with Rice—not made by the artist but procured from the company in 1965 and signed “A. Warhol”— complement the same label inked onto a solid cast aluminum cylinder from 1966. The exhibition’s most mysterious—and unique—object is a Polaroid from the opening of Warhol’s 1971 Tate retrospective. The double-exposed image overlays an anonymous, androgynous figure holding a cigarette on top of a black Campbell’s Soup Can painting. Permeated with an orange glow, the image perfectly embodies how Warhol entwined glamour and the commonplace. — Christopher Howard

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Geoffrey Farmer CASEY KAPLAN 525 West 21st Street February 10–March 19 In his suggestively titled US debut, “Bacon’s Not the Only Thing That Is Cured by Hanging from a String,” Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer plays the damaged and delicate against the faux architectural, employing a collage logic that, while stylish, happily never settles into a comfortable groove. Known for a mercurial refusal of fixity and completion—many of his works are designed to change over the course of their public lives—Farmer produces objects and installations that rope found images and forms into a dance of shifting reference and formal tension. In this exhibition, the Vancouver-based artist shows extracts from one distinct series alongside a number of other individual Geoffrey Farmer, Pulling Your Brains Out works, all of them colored by a likable feeling for the sheer Through Your Nose, 2011, printed material, cut fun of shoving one thing up against another. coat hangers, tape, dimensions variable. Occupying the main gallery is a forest of hand-built lampposts purportedly inspired by a line from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) concerning the satellite’s apocryphally deranging effect on mental health. Each painted wooden post is decorated with a selection of found and adapted bits ’n’ bobs and topped with a colored bulb. No individual component is particularly distinctive, yet the whole set feels rather spooky and—appropriately—slightly unhinged. Pulling Your Brains Out Through Your Nose, 2011, installed in the gallery’s first room, is a cluster of precariously taped-together magazine clippings suspended from chopped-up coat hangers. Again, the artist employs research (his allusion here is to mummification) as a springboard into something altogether more plastic and poetic than the term generally suggests. — Michael Wilson

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Feng Mengbo MOMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue December 12–April 4 Every schoolchild in China learns about the Long March of 1934–35, the Red Army’s sacrificial trek of retreat from the Nationalists that secured Mao’s power and became the CCP’s birth saga. Its stark tales of solidarity through adversity—losing comrades to frost or enemy fire, boiling leather and roots for food—show how far the nation has come. A video-game version might seem mere facetious political parody. Yet the bright 8- and 16-bit adventures blinking onto two eighty-by-twenty-foot screens in Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart, 2008, feel both buoyant and poignant, as we follow a plucky Red Army soldier’s progress Feng Mengbo, Long March: Restart, 2008, against imperialist US rockets, Soviet tanks, and a giant two-channel video projection. Installation view. purple hexapod scuttling across Tiananmen Square. Subtending the work is a keen wistfulness—for a righteous, unified historical purpose as well as for the wide-eyed glee of starter technology. Feng wrote the code himself; anyone can play. A single-player wireless console controls the game on one screen, and the screen opposite zooms in to an extreme close-up on the soldier, so when not pacing along and rooting him on, visitors can surrender to the gentle dazzle of an epic pixel mosaic. Scenarios reference storied episodes from the march (a sabotaged bridge, fatal bog, and icy mountain range evoking heavy casualties that took place at these sites), China’s mise-en-scènes of industrialization (steelworks), and bygone agons of the cold war (the Sino-Soviet split and the space race). Well-loved revolutionary songs percolate in MIDI. At unpredictable intervals, like a glitch or dream, Cultural Revolution–era footage commemorating the event flashes through to a recitation of Mao’s “Long March” ode. The levitating walls and weedy islets, Lego-contoured figures, and snow-dots and rain-dashes (punctuation as weather) remind us of the loveliness of low-tech. Yet in contrast to Cory Arcangel’s Nintendo modding, Feng’s work inhabits this contemporary populist medium to revisit his country’s older, bruised ideals of collectivity. When Super Mario himself makes a cameo, cheerily shuffling about the Great Wall, we might recognize this plumber to be our soldier’s proletarian friend. — Chinnie Ding

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Mark Bradford THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM 144 West 125th Street November 11–March 13 Embedded in a field of nacreous blue and silver, each of the twenty-six letters in Mark Bradford’s Untitled (A-Z), 2010, appears embossed or set into relief on its individual plate. Affixed to their white frames with clear plastic screws, the individual works are hung on the gallery wall in horizontal clusters, placed at uneven levels. A, B, C, and D form their own quorum, while the more exclusive E and F sit huddled nearby. The seemingly arbitrary parsing of the alphabet underscores what is arbitrary about its signs to begin with. In this sense, Bradford participates in a modernist project View of “Mark Bradford: Alphabet,” 2011. that extends back to Raoul Hausmann and Jasper Johns, for whom the letters of the alphabet provided the raw material for explorations both visual and conceptual. So, too, does this project––like Bradford’s work at large––evoke the décollage practices of Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé, though Bradford’s practice entails a more painstaking recycling of original urban materials. The relative simplicity of the pieces suggests a process both time-consuming and meticulous. Bradford has repurposed old posters, layering, stenciling, and setting into relief each letter before sanding them all back down. The resulting battered appearance of the work suggests both the history of its materials and the labor of the artist’s hand. Each letter bears within it the genealogy of other letters, other signs; and each in its singularity thus speaks of a whole city––most notably Bradford’s native Los Angeles, out of which he has fashioned an entire oeuvre. The texture and context of Alphabet are echoed in a separate gallery space across the room. A selection of the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, currently installed under the title “The Production of Space,” features a number of works engaged with urban topography. A chromogenic print by Alice Attie, Untitled (Memorial to Buster), 2001–2004, features the corrugated metal shutter of a shop front. Inscribed with an impromptu tribute to a neighborhood man, the testimonial unfurls between the ridges of the roll-down gate, which also bears the stray spray-painted tags of other neighborhood denizens. At certain points, the paint has peeled away, revealing the marbled sheet of metal beneath. In the light of such work, the formal precision and isolation of Bradford’s plates takes on a renewed poignancy. Their framed solitude highlights––and only slightly hyperbolizes––the fate of signs and signatures in an urban palimpsest. — Ara H. Merjian

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